One of these Lucilla might have been—she shaped towards it at first—but circumstances (fate, if you like) balked it.
India, great gold and rose India, marbled, carved, mosaicked, caravaned, with its bazaars and temples and its lonely peasant huts, its seas of quivering bamboo and its music of glass and silver bangles and anklets, its beautiful naked, plump butchas, its sacred purdahs, its mingled perfumes of lotus and wild yellow hyacinths, of pink jasmine and red, red roses, its dark-eyed, wrinkled, patient cattle with ropes of marigold slung between their snow-white and cream-colored humps, its storied rivers—and the Himalayas, might have appealed to her as the Vicar had thought it would, could she have seen it with him, or in other guidance as cordial and fit. But she saw it through the dry choking dust of a hot, arid, flat Punjabi station, sensed it through the chatter of an English Club—and, so, neither saw nor sensed it at all. She never touched its people. Her syce was merely a servant, so impersonal that she never knew or asked his name, her house servants were nothing to her but “boys,” and even the ayah who tended upon her deftly and faithfully, and saved her baby’s life when croup and convulsions nearly killed it, was only an ayah. Mrs. Crespin, as sweet at heart as the roses in the Surrey vicarage garden, never knew her ayah’s name, never thought of her as having one, never knew where she lived, what she ate, or thought, or believed; never wondered what were her joys and sorrows, never wondered if she ever had ache or pain; never knew, or cared to know, whether the native woman was married or not, or widowed, or whether she had a child of her own.
But she was happy at Sumnee—at first. She had Antony, and Antony was enough.
Her homesickness never quite ceased to ache, and she missed riding and games. She had both at Sumnee, but both were poor substitutes for those she had at “home.” Always athletic, she was not fully satisfied at playing at sports, and gymkanas bored her almost as much as church bazaars had, and the Vicar of Oxlea always had rather discouraged church bazaars. Womanly, yet she was not a woman’s woman—and life in an out-of-the-way one-regiment station in the plains is apt to be hard on a woman who does not greatly care for feminine society, but has no coquetry in her. But she had Antony, and she was happy, and when the promise of motherhood pulsed she was more than happy. And, if many of her hours were alone ones, she had many books, and she read hour after hour almost every day.
Twice the Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth—great chunks of fragrant deodar that Lucilla garlanded with ribbons; the heat they made in December in the plains was appalling, but Lucilla Crespin would not keep Christmas without them. And they ate their plum-pudding hot and flaming; and there’s no dearth of holly in India, if you know where to send for it. Twice her Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth. And then the crash came.
CHAPTER VI
Armistice Day and its solemn celebrations had passed—but not its deep thanksgiving—when the regiment was ordered to Dehra Dun, a more interesting, less narrowed station in itself and less service-bound. There was civilian life in Dehra Dun, and Mrs. Crespin was not sorry to know a few civilians again. She made several interesting such acquaintances there, and the most interesting of them all turned out to be an old schoolmate of Major Crespin’s.
The Great War had irked Crespin—because in it he had been debarred from the active service he craved to be sent on in Europe, or even in Egypt or Mesopotamia, and had been kept relentlessly in India—and hurt him as only a soldierly soldier can be hurt, and by that one thing: having to “stand-by” and do the “damned cushy” jobs, when other chaps—“lucky devils”—were losing legs and eyes and lives in Flanders and Gallipoli—but also it incidentally made him a Major, and a really fine wireless expert.
He did his “bit,” of course, and he did it well. But who did not do their bit from the August of 1914 till Armistice Day, and a little longer! He did his bit, but he chafed and swore, and came near breaking his heart.
Basil Traherne—the celebrated Dr. Traherne now—and Antony Crespin had been at Harrow together, fag and fag-master. But they had not met since, and Crespin seemed less glad to reencounter his onetime fag than might have been natural; for Traherne had been a good and a devoted fag, and the boys had been really good friends.